Lauren Chadwick stories from The Center for Public Integrity2018-03-19T23:44:15-04:00https://www.publicintegrity.org/node/19379/rssMilitary trainees at defense universities later committed serious human rights abuseshttp://www.publicintegrity.org/node/20591Foreign officers who attended top Pentagon schools were later accused of rape, murder, genocide, and coups, according to reportsEthics;Law;Abuse;Culture;Human rights;Personhood;Academia;Hominini;Human rights abuses in Assam;Draft:OHCHR Investigation on Libya2017-01-18T11:48:19-05:002017-01-17T05:00:00-05:00<p><em><strong>This article was co-published with the Daily Beast.</strong></em></p>
<p>The Defense Department trained at least 17 high-ranking foreigners at some of its top schools who were later convicted or accused of criminal and human rights abuses in their own countries, according to a series of little-noticed, annual State Department reports to Congress.</p>
<p>Those singled out in the disclosures included five foreign generals, an admiral, a senior intelligence official, a foreign police inspector, and other military service members from a total of 13 countries, several of which endured war or coups.</p>
<p>Several officers committed crimes within a few years of their training. Others committed crimes more than a decade later. Many of the officers were described in the reports as leaders or participants in high-profile scandals and conflicts in their countries — including extrajudicial killings in Colombia, torture during Nepal’s conflict against Maoists, and murder during a Bolivian internal conflict, according to the State Department reports.</p>
<p>A senior Congolese military officer who attended a year-long program at the U.S. Defense Institute of International Legal Studies, in 2007, for example, was <a href="https://www.treasury.gov/press-center/press-releases/Pages/jl0560.aspx">sanctioned</a> by the U.S. Treasury Department last September for participation in “violent intimidation” of opposition political candidates, including death threats that prompted some of the candidates to withdraw.</p>
<p>The Defense Department’s training was partly intended to instill democratic values and respect for human rights, but at least 13 of the 17 were subsequently arrested or charged in their home countries for crimes such as genocide, murder, and rape, said the <a href="https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3258352-Human-Rights-Report.html">reports</a>, one of which was labeled as “Sensitive but Unclassified.” Others named in the reports were accused of torture or murder by civil and criminal courts, human rights lawyers, or government investigators, but continue to work in their official capacity.</p>
<p>Among the Pentagon- and military-run schools they attended, from 1985 to 2010, were the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, the U.S. Army Engineer School in Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, and others.&nbsp;</p>
<p>Independent analysts, lawyers, and human rights experts say the actual number of U.S. foreign military trainees who committed human rights abuses and other crimes is almost certainly higher than 17, in part because the State Department reports to Congress — required under obscure language inserted into a military assistance bill in 2002 that may soon be removed — only encompass one of the more than fifty U.S. training and defense assistance programs.</p>
<p>At least 33 other foreign military officers who received U.S. military and police training later committed human rights abuses, according to a separate tally by researchers at the nonprofit Center for International Policy, who based their tabulation on U.S. and foreign press accounts of incidents of violence or abuse involving foreign government officials.</p>
<p>Several of those on the Center’s list — including Amadou Sanogo, a former captain in Mali’s army— notoriously led coups against their governments a few years after attending the U.S. institutions.</p>
<p>The reports to Congress account for a “very small universe” of all those trained, said Daniel Mahanty, who directed the Office of Security and Human Rights within the State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor from January 2014 to September 2015. Mahanty said that he did not know the actual number of human rights abusers trained by the United States, because no effort has been attempted to monitor systematically the behavior of the military’s graduates.</p>
<p><strong>Multiple agencies with little accountability</strong></p>
<p>The reports to Congress specifically delineate those participants in the International Military Education and Training (IMET) program tagged in the State Department’s annual human rights reporting effort as having problematic behavior. As the main program that brings foreigners to the United States to attend U.S. military schools at Washington’s expense, IMET is now offered to select military and police officers in more than 120 countries worldwide. A much larger portion of the military’s foreign trainees is instructed in their own countries or at regional foreign centers.</p>
<p>Under a provision of the defense funding bill for fiscal year 2017 that Congress approved and Obama signed in December, the Trump administration will be required to certify that future security assistance “includes a comprehensive curriculum on human rights and the law of armed conflict.” But it does not specify what this should consist of.</p>
<p>The IMET training costs more than $100 million annually and in 2014 trained roughly 4,000 foreign military officers, amounting to 7 percent of the more than 56,000 foreign officers trained by the Defense Department yearly.</p>
<p>The IMET program, in turn, is part of a larger U.S. government effort to build up foreign police and military forces at a total cost of $250 billion since the September 2001 terror attacks. That larger effort is managed by roughly 46 government offices with little coordination and weak oversight, according to multiple critics. While the work is mostly funded by the Pentagon, the State Department is supposed to lead it, and to vet potential trainees.</p>
<p>“These dysfunctions include shortcomings in personnel and bureaucratic structure … a mismatch in planning cultures and budgeting timelines; a lack of policy prioritization and coherence [and] insufficient clarity, transparency, and monitoring and evaluation,” according to the Open Society Foundation’s Rose Jackson, who served as chief of staff in the State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor from 2013 until last April and recently completed a comprehensive <a href="https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/sites/default/files/untangling-the-web-20170109.pdf">study</a> of the issue.</p>
<p>The IMET program was started in 1976 to foster closer relations with foreign militaries, but one of its three stated goals is to teach foreign military officers “basic issues involving internationally recognized human rights,” according to the Foreign Assistance Act.</p>
<p>That goal has been sketchily met, experts say. Most of the IMET courses concern war strategy, technical skills and management, and the participants read military history and are taught how to react in a crisis. The Defense Department says that human rights topics are woven into these courses. At the defense International Studies institute in Newport, Rhode Island, the naval school in Monterey, and the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation in Georgia, for instance, IMET students take courses on international law, military ethics, and civil-military relations as part of yearlong master’s degree programs.</p>
<p>At most of the other service colleges, however, the officers instead participate in field trips to American cities, courthouses and nonprofit organizations meant only generally to expose the IMET students to American values, according to the State Department’s annual “Foreign Military Training” report and interviews with independent experts and international program directors at Defense Department service colleges.</p>
<p>While most of the 17 officers listed in the State Department disclosures took courses on command and strategy, the reports list only one as having completed a rule of law course.</p>
<p>Their experience was typical, not unusual, according to researchers at the Security Assistance Monitor, a unit of the Center for International Policy that tracks U.S. spending related to foreign militaries. In an analysis completed last year based on public reports, the unit concluded that only 11.7 percent of IMET-funded students in 2014 took courses focused on human rights or the rule of law.</p>
<p>A Pentagon spokesman, Navy Cmdr. Patrick L. Evans, said in an email to CPI that the department “is committed to providing comprehensive training” to foreign personnel on military budgeting, civilian control mechanisms, military justice systems, and following codes of conduct that meet international human rights standards.</p>
<p>But Shannon Green, a former senior director for global engagement at the National Security Council during the Obama administration who now directs the Human Rights Initiative at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said “the human rights training component is merely a check the box exercise.” She said she formed this conclusion after interviewing Pentagon officials about how to improve U.S. security assistance.</p>
<p>Colby Goodman, who directs the Security Assistance Monitor and oversaw its IMET research, said the U.S. military should not only give human rights a higher priority but take a broad view of how to instill it. Its courses, he said, should emphasize the importance of combating corruption and creating robust oversight mechanisms, while tailoring training to specific human rights gaps in countries where the officers are serving.</p>
<p><strong>Convict regrets not getting human rights training</strong></p>
<p>Charles Bowry, a former lance corporal in the Saint Kitts and Nevis defense force, said in a jailhouse telephone interview that he did not take a human rights course when he was in the United States at the U.S. Army Engineer School in Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, in 2010. Instead, he participated in field trips — to Washington, D.C., and an Amish village — meant to satisfy that requirement.</p>
<p>Reached at Her Majesty’s Prison in Basseterre, where he’s serving a 16-year sentence for raping a 16-year-old girl, he said he would have liked to take human rights courses to learn more about “the culture and the rights” in the United States, because “knowledge is power.” Bowry, who was sentenced for the rape incident along with another U.S.-trained lance corporal, Jamal Phillip, complained that his conviction was a “political setup” but did not explain.</p>
<p>Even those who got more focused training have had stumbles. According to the State Department’s report to Congress in 2011, John Numbi, an advisor to Democratic Republic of the Congo President Joseph Kabila, completed a year-long training in 2007 at the Defense Institute of International Legal Studies, whose leaders say it focuses on rule of law, governance, and human rights studies. Three years later, Congolese authorities suspended Numbi from his post as head of police, after a human rights activist, Floribert Chebeya, was murdered the same night he was supposed to meet Numbi.</p>
<p>Numbi has denied any wrongdoing and hasn’t been charged in the case, but lawyers representing the victims filed an appeal after a related trial of a few police officers, in which they called for his trial too. “Almost 80 local and international human rights nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) also expressed serious concerns about the credibility and independence of the investigation and [police officers’] trial,” according to the State Department’s 2011 <a href="https://www.state.gov/j/drl/rls/hrrpt/2011humanrightsreport/index.htm?dlid=186183&amp;year=2011#wrapper">human rights report</a> on the Congo. The government there has denounced the&nbsp;sanctions against Numbi imposed last year by the Treasury Department&nbsp;as grotesque violations of international law.</p>
<p>Paul Lambert, an assistant dean at Georgetown University who organized international student programs for the National Defense University from 2008 to 2015, said that training high-ranking foreign officers helps establish friendships and opportunities for future cooperation with foreign militaries and defense ministries. Lambert said in a phone interview that in 2012, when he surveyed IMET students after their training, he found that they were more critical of their home countries’ human rights records, while holding more positive views of the United States.</p>
<p>“It certainly changed the way they were thinking and opened their eyes about the U.S.,” Lambert said. But he added that the trainees are often cut off from the United States when they graduate and security partnerships are often under-utilized. Asked about students who went on to commit human rights abuses, Lambert said, “We’ve trained 8,000 people. There’s bound to be a few bad apples.” He said he understood the concern but considered it a “rare” occurrence.</p>
<p>Green, the former NSC official, said however that a “desire for strong security partnerships” often conflicts with the protection of human rights. U.S. security interests, she said, often override other considerations, and the United States ends up training militaries in countries with bad human rights records.</p>
<p><strong>“I tried to put all the things I learned into practice”</strong></p>
<p>Amadou Sanogo, who five years ago as an army captain led a coup against Mali’s democratic government that helped open the door to the growth of radical Islamists there, took courses at a Marine Corps base in Quantico, Virginia, and at Army bases in Fort Huachuca, Arizona, and Fort Benning, Georgia. He was jailed in 2013 by a new government, and his trial on charges of complicity in assassinations that occurred during the coup began in November and will resume sometime later this year.</p>
<p>Sanogo, who was promoted to general and remained Mali’s strongman for more than a year after the coup, said in a 2013 <a href="http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/interview-with-amadou-sanogo-a-890944.html">interview</a> with the German newspaper Der Spiegel that he had “saved the country” from its “sick” government. When asked what he learned in the United States while training there, Sanogo replied: “America is great country with a fantastic army. I tried to put all the things I learned there into practice here.”</p>
<p>In 2010, the United States trained 1,620 officers from Mali under multiple security assistance programs at a total cost of more than $5 million; during the past decade, it spent over $1 billion on military and development projects there. After the coup in 2013, Gen. Carter Ham, commander of U.S. Africa Command, said in a Washington <a href="http://archive.defense.gov/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=119103">speech</a> that the military had not spent enough time teaching Mali’s soldiers “values, ethics, and military ethos.”</p>
<p>Jose Zamora Induta, another of the 17 officers accused of abuses, trained with the U.S. Coast Guard in 2001 and 2002 and went on to run Guinea-Bissau’s armed forces after political violence in 2009. Induta became head of Guinea-Bissau’s armed forces after the murder of then-President João Bernardo Vieira and the armed forces’ then-Chief of Staff Tagme Na Waie.</p>
<p>According to the State Department <a href="https://www.state.gov/j/drl/rls/hrrpt/2009/af/135958.htm">Human Rights Report</a> for 2009, Induta said initially that the president had “ordered the killing of Na Waie [but] Induta subsequently denied any connection between the killings.” After Induta took over the armed forces, a lawyer who criticized Induta publicly “reportedly was beaten and tortured for four days,” according to the report.</p>
<p>The next month, in April 2009, Marcia Bernicat, then-U.S. Ambassador to Senegal and Guinea-Bissau wrote in a <a href="https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/09DAKAR460_a.html">cable</a> leaked by Wikileaks that Induta had embraced “illegal and brutish tactics” and had either “contempt for rule of law and human rights or … lack of effective command and control over his troops.”</p>
<p>Induta was ousted as chief of staff in 2010. Guinea-Bissau continued to receive IMET funding until 2012, when the armed forces successfully ousted the president in a coup d’état. His lawyer did not return several phone calls.</p>
<p>Colombian Captain Ruben Blanco, who a State Department report said took a cadet orientation course at the School of the Americas, now called the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, in 1994, was arrested in 2004 and accused along with others by the Colombian prosecutor general of associating with paramilitary groups that committed political killings, including of labor leaders, according to the report.</p>
<p>A separate State Department <a href="http://securityassistance.org/sites/default/files/050801coce.pdf">report</a> in Aug. 2005 called the evidence in the case “credible.” The present status of the complaint is unclear.</p>
<p>According to the State Department reports and court records, former Bolivian army Gen. Roberto Claros Flores, a 1987 graduate of the U.S. Air Command and Staff College in Alabama, and former Adm. Luis Aranda, a Marine commander who completed a year of IMET training in 1987, were convicted in 2011 of crimes including genocide, stemming from their role in policing actions taken during Bolivia’s “gas war,” a confrontation in October 2003 between miners and indigenous protestors and the Bolivian government.</p>
<p>Claros remains imprisoned. Bjorn Arp, a lawyer who represents Claros, said in a telephone interview that the evidence in Bolivia used to convict Claros was not "credible" and called accusations against him&nbsp;"curious" and politically-motivated.&nbsp;Aranda could not be reached.</p>
<p>The annual State Department reports disclosing the names of human rights abusers that had received U.S. training under the IMET program would be eliminated under separate legislation proposed last year by Sen. Kelly Ayotte, a New Hampshire Republican member of the Armed Services Committee, and by Sen. Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat. Congressional aides who asked not to be quoted by name said the legislation’s aim is to alleviate administrative burdens imposed on the executive branch.</p>
<p><strong><em>National security managing editor R. Jeffrey Smith contributed to this article. Lauren Chadwick is a Scoville Fellow at the Center.</em></strong></p>
Capt. Amadou Haya Sanogo took courses at military bases in Virginia, Arizona and Georgia before leading a coup against Mali's democratic government.
Lauren Chadwickhttps://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/lauren-chadwickThe Pentagon has shipped more than a million small arms to Iraq and Afghanistan’s defense forceshttp://www.publicintegrity.org/node/20146The quantity of arms exported – worth several billion dollars – is greater than the number of personnel in their security forces The Pentagon;American Airlines Flight 77;National Register of Historic Places in Arlington County, Virginia;Pentagon;United States Department of Defense;Occupation of Iraq;Iraqi Kurdistan2016-08-31T14:41:05-04:002016-08-26T13:03:25-04:00<p><em><strong>This article was co-published with Time Magazine.</strong></em></p>
<p>The Pentagon has spent billions of dollars since 2001 funneling roughly more than a million assault rifles, pistols, shotguns, and machine guns into Iraq and Afghanistan, helping to fuel lasting conflict there, according to a new <a href="https://aoav.org.uk/2016/us-department-of-defence-spend-on-guns-and-ammunition-in-the-war-on-terror-revealed/">report</a> by a London-based nonprofit research and advocacy group <em>Action on Armed Violence</em>.</p>
<p>At least 949,582 of these small arms were given to security forces in Iraq, and at least 503,328 small arms were given to local forces in Afghanistan, the group said. They called this an “under-estimate” based on the information they were able to acquire.</p>
<p>If the figures are correct, the US exports amounted to more than one small arm for each member of Afghanistan’s security forces, which totaled roughly 355,000 soldiers, police, and airmen in February 2015, according to a NATO operational <a href="http://www.rs.nato.int/article/rs-news/afghan-national-defense-and-security-forces-operational-update.html">update</a> on the force. The number of armaments sent to Iraq also vastly exceeded the current&nbsp;size of that country’s active military and paramilitaries - 209,000, according to the International Institute for Strategic Studies’ 2016 Military Balance report.</p>
<p>Until now, the Pentagon hasn’t published such a tally of its own, so the group’s researchers spent a year scouring multiple databases to arrive at its estimate: a general Pentagon contract list, a government-wide contracting list, and multiple government reports on military spending. They finally calculated that the overall&nbsp;value of the contractually-agreed small arms shipments, just to those two countries, was roughly $2.16 billion.</p>
<p>U.S. intelligence reports and eyewitnesses have previously said that a significant fraction of the U.S.-financed arms were either lost or stolen, and that many wound up in the hands of forces opposed to US interests, including terrorist groups such as the Islamic State, or ISIS.</p>
<p>In 2007, for example, the General Accountability Office <a href="http://www.gao.gov/assets/270/264918.pdf">said</a> the coalition forces in Iraq could not account for 190,000 U.S.-supplied weapons. A July 2014 <a href="https://www.sigar.mil/pdf/audits/SIGAR-14-84-AR.pdf">&nbsp;audit</a> by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction sharply criticized the Pentagon for not paying adequate attention to the fate of weaponry sent to Afghanistan, citing rampant discrepancies in records of gun serial numbers and other problems. In many instances over the past two years, U.S.-advised forces in those two countries have engaged in protracted clashes with terrorists equipped with captured caches of U.S. small arms, as well as U.S. tanks, artillery, and armored personnel carriers.</p>
<p>“There are direct and real consequences,” said Iain Overton, a veteran investigative journalist who is the group’s director, including “a destabilized Middle East.” He said Americans believe “that good guys with guns will get rid of bad buys with guns but that system doesn’t work when you throw guns into lawless, anarchic societies.” His group says its funding comes from “governments, institutions, and foundations,” and that it has a “partnership” with Norway’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.</p>
<p>The report was released as international discussions are under way in Geneva about how to improve the implementation of a 2013 accord meant to provide transparency about small arms transfers, known as the <a href="https://www.un.org/disarmament/convarms/att/">Arms Trade Treaty</a>. While the treaty does not restrict the number or type of weaponry that can be exported, it asks signatories not to sell arms that will create an overwhelming risk of negative consequences, including war crimes and attacks on civilians. The United States has signed the treaty but has not ratified it and is not a state party. As a result, it has not submitted annual reports of its arms transfers to others, as the treaty requires.</p>
<p>Indeed, finding information on arms exports to Iraq and Afghanistan is like trying to “[put] together a jigsaw puzzle with only half the pieces,” Nic Marsh, a researcher at the Peace Research Institute in Oslo, Norway who has worked on this issue since 2008 said in an email. Overton’s first attempts to gather information from the Pentagon about U.S.-financed exports of AK-47’s to Afghanistan, using the Freedom of Information Act, produced documents that he said were completely redacted.</p>
<p>It's clear that the Pentagon has not been eager to make the size of its small-arms exports as clear as it could. The Pentagon’s public announcements of contracts related to small arms exports to Iraq and Afghanistan, overseen by its press office, only list 19,602 of the 1.45 million small arms, or roughly 1 percent of the guns the department actually sent to Iraq and Afghanistan, the group’s report said. Of those publicly-disclosed contracts, a third were either mis-numbered or contained different information than versions of the same contracts that were listed in the Federal Procurement Database System, the report said.</p>
<p>When asked about the discrepancies, Mark Wright, a Pentagon spokesperson, responded in an email to the Center for Public Integrity that the two public accounts are based on different definitions, “which if not clearly understood, can lead to incorrect conclusions.”</p>
<p>Wright gave a slightly smaller overall tally: “We have a total of about 1.1 million weapons that DOD either provided or assisted in providing to Iraq and Afghanistan,” he said, noting that in some cases, individual contracts might have spelled out the maximum number of arms authorized to be shipped, rather than the number actually sent.&nbsp;</p>
<p>Overton said he stood by his larger&nbsp;tally, and that the team scoured their information for inaccuracies after carefully examining the differences between various databases.</p>
<p>Asked whether or not the Pentagon attempts to track where the guns it sells wind up, Wright responded that speed was “essential” in the early years of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. “As a result, lapses in accountability of some of the weapons transferred occurred,” Wright wrote in an emailed statement also provided to other reporters asking about the group’s report. He said that the department now “tracks the origin, shipping, and in-country distribution of all weapons” it exports to Iraq and Afghanistan.</p>
<p>But even if such measures are carried out with great care – an unlikely event in Afghanistan, given the documented low literacy rates among local security personnel there, they cannot prevent U.S. armaments from being seized by others on the battlefield. The United States is not the only country that provided weapons to Iraq and Afghani forces that went missing over the past fifteen years, and not the only one to have exported weapons that specifically ended up in the hands of terrorists. In 2014, the Center for Public Integrity<a href="http://www.publicintegrity.org/2014/10/05/15827/investigators-find-islamic-state-used-ammo-made-21-countries-including-america"> reported </a>that fighters associated with the Islamic State had acquired or seized weapons from at least 21 countries, including the United States, China, Russia, and several Balkan states.</p>
<p>“A significant percentage of these weapons will go into the environment and eventually end up in the hands of the Taliban, ISIS” and other non-state actors, says Ed Laurance, an expert on armed violence and professor of international policy and development at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey. “Ammunition comes in, it goes out. Terrorists can get it, civilians can get it…it’s impossible to keep track of [small arms]” because the environments are so insecure.</p>
An Afghan Army soldier picks up his weapon at a training facility in the outskirts of Kabul, Afghanistan, Tuesday, Nov. 26, 2013.
Lauren Chadwickhttps://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/lauren-chadwickR. Jeffrey Smithhttps://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/r-jeffrey-smithU.S. declines to acknowledge Afghanistan’s child soldiers, experts complainhttp://www.publicintegrity.org/node/20011Critics say the administration doesn’t want to hold up aid to Afghanistan, despite a law barring payments to forces with armed children2016-08-23T15:56:30-04:002016-08-03T05:00:00-04:00<p><em><strong>Aug. 5, 2016:</strong> This&nbsp;article has been <a href="https://www.publicintegrity.org/2016/08/03/20011/us-declines-acknowledge-afghanistan-s-child-soldiers-experts-complain#correction">corrected</a>.</em></p>
<p><em><strong>This article was co-published with Foreign Policy magazine</strong>.</em></p>
<p>Investigators for the United Nations found 48 child soldiers in Afghanistan last year, with more than one-fourth working for government-backed forces such as the Afghan National Army and the Afghan Local and National Police. But that news somehow never made an impact in Washington.</p>
<p>In an annual <a href="http://www.state.gov/j/tip/rls/tiprpt/2016/index.htm">report</a> released on June 30 that names 10 foreign countries known to use and recruit child soldiers, the State Department didn’t include Afghanistan — a country with forces labeled as “persistent perpetrators” by the United Nations in a <a href="http://www.un.org/ga/search/view_doc.asp?symbol=s/2016/360&amp;referer=/english/&amp;Lang=E">report</a> issued just two months earlier.</p>
<p>The discrepancy is partly a matter of legal interpretation but mostly one mired in international politics, it turns out.</p>
<p>Countries that employ child soldiers in their armed forces are barred from receiving specific types of U.S. military assistance or weapons, under a U.S. <a href="http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/135981.pdf">law</a> enacted in 2008. But the Obama administration says Afghanistan is not subject to the law because its Local Police force — which uses child soldiers, and experts say operates like a militia or a paramilitary group — is not part of the armed forces.</p>
<p>This claim has allowed the U.S. Defense Department to give the Afghan Local Police a total of $470 million as of April 2015, <a href="https://www.sigar.mil/pdf/audits/SIGAR-16-3-AR.pdf">according</a> to a tally made by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction. But nonprofit groups and independent experts on Afghanistan and the use of children in armed conflicts say the administration has misinterpreted the U.S. law or abused some ambiguities in its text.</p>
<p>“Not including Afghanistan sends out the message that children who have been recruited by police forces deserve less protection,” said Charu Lata Hogg, an associate fellow at the independent London-based institute Chatham House, who has worked extensively on the issue of child soldiers. “More children are likely to be recruited and used by militias than the military themselves.”</p>
<p>Even if the decision is not a violation of the law, it constitutes a breach of the “spirit of the law,” said Jo Becker, children’s rights advocacy director at the nonprofit organization Human Rights Watch in New York.</p>
<p>The law states that certain types of military assistance and armaments cannot flow to countries with “government-supported armed groups” that use child soldiers. It also makes clear that these groups include “paramilitaries, militias [and] civil defense forces.” The law does not explicitly mention police, however. Child soldiers are defined as those under the age of 18 who&nbsp;are recruited by such groups to work as soldiers or perform other tasks, including working as cooks or porters.</p>
<p>In 2015, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani signed a presidential decree criminalizing the recruitment of child soldiers, but the problem persists, experts say. The U.N. report, which included Afghanistan in a list of 14 countries that use and recruit child soldiers, noted that the number of verified cases last year was double that in 2014. It said the majority of the cases involved the Taliban and other armed groups, but five children were in the Local Police, five in the National Police, and three&nbsp;in the National Army.&nbsp;</p>
<p>“There is continuing concern about allegations of cross-border recruitment of children and of use of religious schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan for child recruitment and military training by the Taliban and other armed groups,” said the report, which was issued under Secretary General Ban Ki-moon’s name. “I am concerned … about the lack of oversight mechanisms for Afghan Local Police recruitment” involving children.</p>
<p>The State Department, in its annual human rights report for 2015, itself takes note of these and other "reports." But when asked to explain why Afghanistan was not included on the U.S. list of nations with child soldiers, a State Department spokesman in the Bureau of Public Affairs, who said he could not be named, wrote in an email that “although the Afghan Local Police is a government security force, it falls outside of the armed forces of Afghanistan.”&nbsp; The spokesman also wrote that in the administration’s view, Afghanistan is taking useful steps to address the use and recruitment of child soldiers.</p>
<p>A somewhat different account of the Local Police’s role in armed conflict is given in Kabul. The Afghan Ministry of Interior Affairs, asked in an email if it should be considered part of the national government, said it is an “armed defense force” funded by the national government and that its purpose was to operate at the village level to “secure the insecure areas.”</p>
<p>Other documents make clear the force is not like police in Western nations: It does not investigate crime or arrest suspects. Its only function is instead to fight the insurgency, much like a militia. This is what NATO and the U.S. military state in a 112-page 2011 <a href="https://williamaarkin.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/afghan_moi_advisor_guide_version_1-0_9_may_20111.pdf">guide</a> to the function and structure of Afghan police forces, labelled “for official use only” but posted online and confirmed as authentic by a NATO spokesman. The account is echoed in the Ministry of Interior Affairs' 11-page procedural guide for the Afghan Local Police, prepared by four high ranking members of the Afghan Local Police and the nation’s Deputy Minister for Security in 2010.</p>
<p>The Afghan Local Police constitute an armed group because they “are engaging in conflict with other security groups against the Taliban,” said Becker, who investigates the use and recruitment of child soldiers by armed forces around the world. Therefore, “Afghanistan belongs on the list,” she says.</p>
<p>Experts note that a 10-year-old member of the Afghan Local Police, Wasil Ahmad, became famous in the region after fighting the Taliban in 2015; he clutched a machine gun to his chest in photos taken before he was killed by insurgents&nbsp;earlier this year. As&nbsp;recently as last October, a 17-year-old member of the Afghan National Police told the London-based advocacy group Child Soldiers International that at the age of 15 or 16 he used a false identification card to register for the force, according to the advocacy group’s March 2016 <a href="http://www.child-soldiers.org/shop/afghanistan-briefing-march-2016">report</a> on Afghanistan. He said the only person who questioned his age was the doctor who completed the medical examination. The boy also told them he met roughly 15 kids younger than him at police training in Kabul.</p>
<p>One of the drafters of the 2008 law, Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., said in an email that in his view “the use of child soldiers is unacceptable in any nation’s military, and the United States has an added responsibility to help eradicate the practice in countries where we are engaged.” In Afghanistan, he said, there does “seem to be a greater problem in the Afghan police forces” than in the military. But he also said the law’s provisions do not cover police, highlighting what he considers a loophole that “warrants a closer look.”</p>
<p>Congress already amended the law once before, Durbin wrote, and it can do so again. He was referring to a <a href="https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/BILLS-113s47enr/pdf/BILLS-113s47enr.pdf">change</a> made in 2013 to amend the law to prohibit providing peacekeeping funding for countries with child soldiers, a type of aid that had not originally been included in the law. This occurred after the U.S. listed Somalia — a country that has long employed child soldiers — but continued sending military aid through peacekeeping accounts.</p>
<p>Ironically, even if the provisions of the law were drawn tightly enough to cover all the foreign forces that might employ child soldiers, the president still has the authority to exempt countries from the funding ban, keeping aid going if needed for U.S. national security — a waiver that Obama <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2015/09/29/presidential-determination-and-memorandum-determination-respect-child">issued</a> last year for the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Nigeria, Somalia, and South Sudan.</p>
<p>In the Congo alone, U.N. investigators verified the recruitment of 488 children in 2015 by 12 different governmental and non-governmental armed groups. In some cases in the DRC, children were abducted from their homes, <a href="http://www.child-soldiers.org/News/experiences-of-former-child-soldiers-in-democratic-republic-of-congo">according</a> to Marie de la Soudière, an expert consultant who led Child Soldiers International’s field work in the country. The United States authorized roughly $14 million in peacekeeping funds for the DRC for 2016.</p>
<p>In Nigeria, children manned checkpoints and operated as spies in a government militia, known as the Civilian Joint Task Force, according to the U.N.’s <a href="http://www.un.org/ga/search/view_doc.asp?symbol=s/2016/360&amp;referer=/english/&amp;Lang=E">report</a>. In Somalia, the army recruited 218 children; in South Sudan, U.N. investigators said they saw children wearing military outfits throughout the country. Many children engaged in direct conflict.</p>
<p>Afghanistan is not the only country that the United States omits. Unlike the U.S. list, the U.N. list of nations with child soldiers includes Colombia, the Central African Republic, the Philippines and Mali. The U.N. has a more comprehensive definition for countries on the list; it includes all governmental and non-governmental armed groups that use and recruit child soldiers in each nation -- including police. But while the U.N. list has remained relatively stable since 2010 at roughly 14 countries&nbsp; the U.S. list has grown from six countries in 2010 to 10 countries in 2016.</p>
<p>This dismal trend has generally not, however, impeded U.S. foreign aid to the problem countries, despite the ambition of the 2008 law’s drafters to use such aid as a cudgel to force improved behavior.</p>
<p>The Obama administration has authorized over $100 million in peacekeeping funds for Somalia and roughly $30 million for South Sudan for 2016 alone, according to <a href="http://www.stimson.org/sites/default/files/FY2017%20CSPA%20Military%20Assistance%20and%20Child%20Soldiers%20Data%20Set.pdf">estimates</a> provided by the Stimson Center, a nonprofit Washington-based global security think tank. Overall, it withheld just 5.8 percent of roughly $1 billion in military assistance and 1.7 percent of over $300 million worth of arms sales from 12 countries that have been identified on the U.S. child soldiers list since 2010, according to Stimson’s analysis of funds subject to the law. In that same period, the administration authorized at least $7.8 billion in military assistance and arms sales for Afghanistan that would have been prohibited by the child soldiers’ law.</p>
<p>Experts say that putting countries onto the “child soldier list” sometimes has useful consequences. After the United States put Chad on the list in 2010, 2011, and 2013, the government signed an action plan with the United Nations in 2011 to address the issue; by 2014, the U.N.’s own list of groups that use and recruit child soldiers no longer included Chad.</p>
<p>Leaving Afghanistan off the U.S. list of nations that employ child soldiers — even if it subsequently gets a waiver — gives others “a clear roadmap [to] get around the law,” says Jesse Eaves, who works with the U.S.-based foundation Humanity United on issues related to human trafficking. “These countries can just change the name of their armed forces … and not even get lsted. It’s just a blatant runaround of what the law was intended to do."</p>
<p><a id="correction" name="correction"></a></p>
<p><em><strong>Lauren Chadwick is a Scoville Fellow at the Center.</strong></em></p>
<p><em><strong>Correction,&nbsp;Aug.&nbsp;5, 2016, 2:51&nbsp;p.m.: </strong>An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that more than half of the child soldiers verified by the United Nations worked for government-backed forces in Afghanistan. Over one-fourth worked for government-backed forces.</em></p>
Relatives attend the funeral of 10-year-old Afghan boy&nbsp;Wasil Ahmad&nbsp;in Uruzgan province, of Afghanistan, Wednesday, Feb. 3, 2016. Ahmad&nbsp;was declared a hero after fighting the Taliban and was killed by insurgents while on his way to school.
Lauren Chadwickhttps://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/lauren-chadwickCongress funds problematic weapons the Pentagon does not wanthttp://www.publicintegrity.org/node/19869An extra warship is just one of many unrequested items being forced on the Department of Defense in a spending bill slated for Senate vote Pentagon2016-07-07T11:23:20-04:002016-07-05T05:00:00-04:00<p><em><strong>A detail&nbsp;in this story has been clarified.</strong></em></p>
<p>In the nearly eight years since the first Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) was delivered to the Navy, it hasn’t won many ardent fans outside the Navy, its home-state lawmakers, or the employees of the two shipbuilders producing dueling models. The ships’ maiden voyages have been marked by cracked hulls, engine failures, unexpected rusting, software snafus, weapons glitches, and persistent criticism of how vulnerable they are to an attack.</p>
<p>“The ship is not reliable,” the Pentagon’s operational test and evaluation director said in a <a href="http://www.dote.osd.mil/pub/reports/FY2015/pdf/navy/2015lcs.pdf">report</a> released in January 2016, only the most recent such judgment it has made. During 113 days of testing on one ship last year, some of the engines and water jets responsible for propelling the ship forward were out of commission for 45 days.</p>
<p>Defense Secretary Ashton Carter expressed his concern&nbsp;last December by&nbsp;ordering the overall number of new ships trimmed from 52 to 40,&nbsp;saving&nbsp;billions of dollars.&nbsp;The department's leaders&nbsp;also ordered production scaled back from three to two ships in 2017 and said all the&nbsp;work should eventually go to just one of the two shipyards.&nbsp;&nbsp;</p>
<p>But lawmakers on Capitol Hill — provoked or perhaps inspired by a steady stream of contractor donations and unusually determined Navy lobbying — are now on the verge of ordering the Pentagon to build more than Carter wanted.</p>
<p>A defense appropriations <a href="https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/senate-bill/3000">bill</a> moving towards Senate approval in coming days or weeks directs that $475 million be spent by the Navy to procure an extra LCS next year. The House of Representatives has already passed <a href="https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/house-bill/5293">legislation</a> ordering that $384 million be spent on the extra ship. So it’s virtually certain to happen, a prospect that cheers the Navy greatly but has evoked dismay among the ships’ many critics.</p>
<p>The extra spending is a direct repudiation of the Secretary of Defense, putting the Navy back on track with its original three-ship production schedule for 2017 -- and pushing the decision about the fate and total size of the LCS fleet off to the next president.</p>
<p>The Obama administration “strongly objects” to buying the extra ship, the White House said in a budget <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/legislative/sap/114/saphr5293r_20160614.pdf">message</a> to Congress on June 14. It said just two are needed now to preserve a competition that “ensures the best price for the taxpayer on the remaining ships” and that spending more would needlessly drain funds from other military priorities, including undersea, surface and aviation programs. Carter made clear at the time he cut the program back that that there’s no love lost between his office and the Navy’s command, which he accused in a blunt <a href="http://ec.militarytimes.com/static/pdfs/OSD-Carter-memo-to-Mabus-151214-cut-LCS.pdf">letter</a> of ignoring technical risks, neglecting warfighting needs, and prioritizing warship “quantity over lethality.”</p>
<p>The extra ship, which is part of a program&nbsp;with an estimated lifecycle cost of at least&nbsp;$45 billion,&nbsp;is just one in a long list of armaments that Congress is about to force the Pentagon to buy against its will — following an annual ritual that routinely pads spending for the nation’s defense by billions of dollars and sometimes gives U.S. soldiers equipment that doesn’t work or they don’t need.</p>
<p>According to Taxpayers for Common Sense, a nonprofit spending watchdog based in Washington, D.C., the House bill passed on June 16 contains at least $6.7 billion worth of research and armaments that the Defense Department’s leaders did not request in their February budget proposal. That’s even higher than the $4.6 billion in unwanted expenditures that Congress approved last year, the group says.</p>
<p>The House bill, for example, includes $1.5 billion for an unrequested modern “amphibious” warship for dual land and sea missions, $400 million for four unrequested C-40 aircraft to carry cargo and commanders, and $1 billion worth of unrequested National Guard equipment, a perennial pork-barrel favorite, the Taxpayers’ <a href="http://www.taxpayer.net/library/article/showers-of-cash-for-pentagon-contractors">report</a> said. The Senate bill itself <a href="http://www.taxpayer.net/images/uploads/FY17_SAC_Defense_list_of_unrequested_procurement_programs-cropped.pdf">would add</a> almost $4.3 billion for 49 unrequested programs, including $1 billion for a coast guard ship to break ice in the Arctic and Antarctic, $130 million extra for an unspecified classified program, and $900 million worth of unrequested National Guard equipment.</p>
<p>“Congress wants to pass out the cash and look like they’re being strong on defense,” said Steve Ellis, vice president of Taxpayers for Common Sense and a former U.S. Coast Guard officer. He adds that members are also keen to help home-state contractors, including some that earn billions of dollars annually from Pentagon spending and whose employees in turn give generously to&nbsp;key lawmakers that support the weapons systems they make or service.</p>
<p><strong>Struggling to meet minimal requirements</strong></p>
<p>The LCS was conceived as an unusual multi-mission ship platform, capable of being used in shallow water to help fight battles on shore (“littoral” denotes a region along a shore) as well as in deep-water engagements, as a replacement for existing mine sweepers, frigates, and coastal patrol craft. &nbsp;It was to be equipped to counter armed boats, submarines or mines by reconfiguring the ships’ weapon systems, sensors and crews according to needs of the moment.</p>
<p>In that sense, according to critics, it is unfortunately the sea-going equivalent of the Air Force’s trillion-dollar&nbsp;F-35 fighter plane: designed too ambitiously&nbsp;to fulfill too many roles and as a consequence well over its budget, flawed in its execution, and struggling to meet even minimal operational requirements.</p>
<p>Among its more notorious missteps, the first of the new littoral combat ships to be deployed, named the USS Freedom, was <a href="https://www.publicintegrity.org/2013/07/26/13056/fast-agile-navy-ship-prone-embarrassing-glitches">immobilized in the South China Sea</a> — a key future operating area — during a trial run in 2013, after also experiencing a cracked hull and unexpected rusting. A year later, auditors at the Government Accountability Office (GAO)&nbsp;<a href="http://www.gao.gov/assets/670/664672.pdf">reported</a> that the USS Freedom had spent 58% of its 10-month deployment idle in port in Singapore.</p>
<p>Last December, a second ship, the USS Milwaukee, broke down and had to be towed 40 miles after a software malfunction failed to allow the clutch to transfer between the warship’s gas turbines and diesel engines, spewing metallic debris into the gears. Another ship, the USS Fort Worth, was sidelined in January — and remains in Singapore today — because its operators failed to follow proper maintenance procedures and adequate lubricants did not reach those same gears, which&nbsp;are vital to the&nbsp;operation of waterjets needed for&nbsp;high-speed&nbsp;operation.</p>
<p>Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain, R-Ariz., a former Navy captain, told the service’s officials in a February <a href="https://news.usni.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/mccain_cno_lcs.pdf#viewer.action=download">letter</a> cosigned by the committee’s ranking Democrat, Jack Reed (R.I.), that LCS “seaframe failures and system reliability shortfalls” as well as its weak armaments had made him highly skeptical that the ships could defeat anything more than “a small number of lightly armed boats” — well short of what he cited as the Navy’s boasts that it could put “the enemy fleet on the bottom of the ocean.”</p>
<p>McCain said the program had “significant design, testing, integration, and deployment challenges.” And his committee eventually approved a defense authorization bill that supported the Obama administration’s LCS production cutback. But it wasn’t the last word.</p>
<p>Despite the ship's troubles, the Navy wanted more. In March, Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus told the House Armed Services Committee that the military branch had a “validated need” for 52 littoral combat ships, 12 more than his boss at the Pentagon said it did. Mabus went on to say that Carter’s plan to choose one shipyard to make most of the ships instead of two would drive up the price. At an industry <a href="http://www.navy.mil/navydata/people/secnav/Mabus/Speech/Surface%20Navy%202016.pdf">conference</a> in January, he called the overall program a “success story.”</p>
<p>Key congressmen rushed to support Mabus. Led by Rep. Bradley Byrne, R-Ala., and Rep. Reid Ribble, R-Wisc., who represent districts that house the two competing shipbuilders, roughly 40 House lawmakers signed two April <a href="https://byrne.house.gov/sites/byrne.house.gov/files/FY2017%20LCS%20Letter%20to%20HASC_Final.pdf">letters</a> to the House Armed Services Committee and House Committee on Appropriations applauding the ship’s “production efficiencies and cost savings,” and stating that reductions to the fleet would “hinder the Navy’s ability to respond to threats around the globe.”</p>
<p>Financial backers of the shipyards in question — Austal USA, in Mobile, Alabama, and Marinette Marine in Marinette, Wisconsin&nbsp;— reinforced this message in hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of lobbying from January 2016 to March 2016 according to reports filed by them with the House and Senate clerks. Lockheed, a prime contractor on the LCS that says it is also a minority investor in the Marinette shipyard,&nbsp;said it <a href="http://disclosures.house.gov/ld/ldxmlrelease/2016/Q1/300800392.xml">spent</a> $3.65 million to lobby Congress on all issues between January and March 2016, with an unspecified portion related to shipbuilding. Austal USA --which has narrower interests -- separately <a href="http://disclosures.house.gov/ld/ldxmlrelease/2016/Q1/300790975.xml">spent</a> $189,096 lobbying just on the shipbuilding provisions in House and Senate defense appropriations bills.</p>
<p>Austal USA <a href="https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientlbs.php?id=D000047511&amp;year=2016">employed 12 lobbyists</a>, almost all of which&nbsp;previously worked in government, including on appropriations committees, according to information gathered by the nonpartisan, nonprofit Center for Responsive Politics in Washington, D.C. Lockheed <a href="https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientlbs.php?id=D000000104&amp;year=2016">employed 70 lobbyists</a>, according to the Center’s data, of which over two-thirds had previously been in government posts, including at the Department of Defense and on appropriations committees. At least six of Lockheed’s lobbyists formerly worked with the Navy; one of Austal USA’s lobbyists was a naval captain and another previously worked for Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., a strong supporter of the LCS.</p>
<p>The two contractors’ home-state lawmakers didn't stop at signing the letters. “Congress should not allow a Secretary of Defense with less than a year left in office to decide the fate of a critical Navy program like the LCS,” Rep. Byrne said in a <a href="https://byrne.house.gov/media-center/press-releases/subcommittee-approves-byrne-amendment-to-protect-austal-shipyard">statement</a> before the amendment passed in April. A provision he successfully inserted in the House-passed bill would block Carter’s plan to give all the work to just one shipyard.</p>
<p>“The LCS is critical to our Navy’s ability to respond to current and future threats across the world,” Sen. Shelby said in a <a href="http://www.shelby.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/2015/12/shelby-sessions-byrne-vow-to-fight-obama-administration-s-efforts-to-cut-the-lcs-program">statement</a> after Carter announced his plan in December. “I will fight tooth and nail against this misguided attempt to needlessly undermine the security of our nation and the American people.”</p>
<p>It's clear why home-state lawmakers would support the extra spending. But the influence of the shipbuilders runs far deeper at the Capitol. Lockheed Martin has given campaign funds to almost every current Senate and House defense appropriations subcommittee member, a total of at least $2.3 million from 1999 to 2015, according to the&nbsp;Center for Public Integrity’s analysis of Federal Election Commission filings and Center for Responsive Politics data. Though the contractor is not allowed to give directly to candidates, Lockheed Martin’s employees can contribute and its company-directed political action committee or PAC, which collects employee and other funds, can donate.</p>
<p>Since 1998, Rep. Frelinghuysen R-NJ, the key House subcommittee chairman, has received at least $151,850 from Lockheed Martin’s employees and PAC; the amounts rose after he assumed that role in late 2013. Rep. Kay Granger, R-Tx, the vice-chair, has received at least $341,850 in contributions from Lockheed Martin’s employees and PAC, including those to her leadership PAC, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. The ranking member, Rep. Pete Visclosky, D-IN, has received at least $102,100 in individual and PAC donations. The House Appropriations Committee chairman, Rep. Hal Rogers, R-KY, also received at least $82,475 from Lockheed Martin’s PAC and employees.</p>
<p>Sen. Barbara Mikulski, vice-chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, received&nbsp;more than&nbsp;$72,000 from Lockheed Martin’s employees and PAC since 1989. Senate defense appropriations chairman Thad Cochran, R-MS, received over $40,000. Austal USA, a subsidiary of an Australian defense firm that mainly makes ships and has a much narrower set of legislative interests, has given thousands of dollars to Sen. Shelby and to two House defense appropriators.</p>
<p>Spokesmen for Cochran, Granger, and Shelby said the contributions did not influence their support for the ship; the others did not immediately respond to a request for comment.</p>
<p>“When you’re the chair or senior member of the defense appropriations committee you’re going to get a lot of money from various defense contractors…[that] hope that you act favorably on their wants,” Ellis said. If the contractors have been making campaign contributions “right along, they can potentially get to the senior members of the committee whether [the members]…represent them or not.”</p>
<p><strong>Upgrades with scant impact</strong></p>
<p>Supporters of the program say that future ships will be different than those produced so far. They’ve been formally rebranded (from "LCS") as mere frigates — a less ambitious naval nomenclature referring generally to any fast and small ships. They are supposed to be equipped with a bit more armor, a better missile decoy system, improved electronic warfare gear, and a better air-search radar, which will boost their costs by an estimated 20 to 30 percent. But the troubled anti-mine warfare technology the ships were meant to have — which failed repeatedly in tests — will be dropped altogether, leaving that mission to more proven solutions.</p>
<p>The rebranding came in the aftermath of a special study ordered by then-Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel in 2014, which used statistical modeling to assess the potential capabilities, costs, and delivery dates of many possible new designs. The Navy decided as a result of the study to procure a version of the warship that was “not substantially different” from the littoral combat ship, according to a 56-page <a href="http://www.gao.gov/assets/680/677764.pdf">report</a> issued June 9 by the GAO.</p>
<p>Due to space, weight, power, and cooling constraints, it chose the “least capable” design of all the available options, a frigate that&nbsp;could not fulfill all the anti-submarine warfare and surface warfare tasks that were previously considered important, the report said. Navy officials agreed their selection contained only minor modifications to the LCS but said their choice was dictated by a need to&nbsp;operate the ship militarily by 2020 and to avoid the higher expenses of a more sweeping redesign.</p>
<p>The GAO report nonetheless cited internal Pentagon warnings that, despite the technical fixes, the new frigates' chance of surviving an attack is unlikely to be greatly improved. The report noted that its range will be as much as 30 percent lower and said it will not be capable of defending other ships in a pitched sea battle. It said the Navy, in its review of alternatives, had underestimated the new frigate’s likely costs, while overstating the costs of crew manning for rival ship designs.</p>
<p>“The Navy’s business case for the acquisition of the frigate is compromised,” the GAO said, “by unknowns related to the ship’s design, cost, and program oversight plans.”</p>
<p>The GAO report concluded moreover that proceeding with the production of additional ships without first conducting more testing is a mistake.&nbsp; The last of the Navy’s LCS survivability tests will be completed in 2018, by which time 18 of the ships will have been completed and delivered to the service. The ships are already&nbsp;a year&nbsp;or more behind schedule and over budget, and so the GAO suggested a "production pause"&nbsp;in which Congress would fund no new ships at all&nbsp;in 2017, not even the two that the Pentagon’s leadership says it wants.</p>
<p>Some of the ships’ supporters say these growing pains are common with any new ship. Ronald O’Rourke, a naval issues analyst at the Congressional Research Service, said in testimony for the House Armed Services Committee in 2014 that many naval acquisition programs stumble in the beginning. The Navy’s favorite ships today were often “not very well regarded in earlier years,” O’Rourke said.</p>
<p>But extensive mishaps with the LCS have called into question not just the ship, but the Navy's ability to make decisions about what it really needs. In a <a href="https://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/weapons/RL33741.pdf">report</a> released June 14, O’Rourke cited naval officials’ admissions dating back to 2003 that it had not studied carefully enough whether the LCS is the right ship for warfare in shallow waters, an omission that he said explains many of its troubles today -- but which don't seem to undermine their confidence that they need to sail forward with the program, full speed ahead.</p>
<p><strong><em>Lauren Chadwick is a Scoville Fellow at the Center for Public Integrity. The Center’s news developer Chris Zubak-Skees contributed to this article.</em></strong></p>
<p><strong><em>This article was co-published with Politico Magazine.</em></strong></p>
<p><strong><em>Clarification, July 6, 2016: </em></strong><em>The article initially described the Marinette shipyard as Lockheed Martin's. It was changed to reflect Lockheed's statement that it is only a minority investor in the shipyard.</em></p>
The launch of the&nbsp;ninth littoral combat ship,&nbsp;the&nbsp;USS Little Rock,&nbsp;into the Menominee River in Marinette, Wisconsin, on July 18, 2015.&nbsp;
Lauren Chadwickhttps://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/lauren-chadwickR. Jeffrey Smithhttps://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/r-jeffrey-smithThe costly truth of emergency spending in Iraq and Afghanistanhttp://www.publicintegrity.org/node/19738Troops are leaving, but the Pentagon&#039;s war funding is increasingIraq War;Occupation of Iraq;Financial cost of the Iraq War;Treaty of Saadabad2016-05-27T05:24:05-04:002016-05-27T05:00:00-04:00<p>Eight years ago, when America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were still raging at full force, the Pentagon’s annual budget for those conflicts amounted to $1 million for each troop who was actually fighting. &nbsp;But today, even as the Obama Administration continues to wind those wars down, the newest proposed Pentagon war-fighting budget would spend $5.9 million per deployed troop, a reflection, critics say, of sleight&nbsp;of&nbsp;hand that puts unrelated spending into a budget that’s supposed to be only for waging war.</p>
<p>The figures come from a new <a href="http://www.stimson.org/sites/default/files/file-attachments/DefenseDivided_OCO.pdf">report</a> by the Stimson Center, a nonprofit, nonpartisan think tank based in Washington D.C. The report highlights the amount of spending in the special war-fighting account that authors argue should instead be part of the basic year-to-year budgeting for the Defense Department. &nbsp;</p>
<p>The Obama administration has requested $58.8 billion for that war<a href="http://comptroller.defense.gov/Portals/45/Documents/defbudget/fy2017/FY2017_Budget_Request_Overview_Book.pdf"> budget</a> – the Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) fund—in fiscal year 2017. This represents a $200 million increase from the enacted budget in 2016 even though administration plans call for 9,767 troops in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2017, a reduction of roughly 3,500 troops from this year.</p>
<p>“The gulf between troop levels and OCO-designated spending has widened significantly in recent years,” Stimson fellow Laicie Heeley and intern Anna Wheeler write in the 20-page report released May 24. OCO includes a multitude of training efforts for Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria, which the Stimson authors argue “no longer require emergency funding” because the initiatives are ongoing and can be easily anticipated year after year. “The funds are actually going to a larger amount of base budget needs,” said Heeley in an interview.</p>
<p>Since 2001, the Pentagon has been issued a separate check for these emergency war &nbsp;funds, which a variety of critics say have become an unnecessary “slush fund” for a multitude of unrelated defense and non-defense programs;&nbsp; the Overseas Contingency Operations label was inaugurated in 2009.</p>
<p>OCO now supports projects such as the European Reassurance Initiative (ERI) – a program developed in 2014 to prove the U.S. remained committed to Central Europe despite Russian President Vladimir Putin’s Crimean invasion, and the Counterterrorism Partnerships Fund (CTPF), which supports US Africa Command and US Central Command training programs overseas.</p>
<p>OCO is not subject to the 2011 Budget Control Act that is supposed to cap the Pentagon’s spending, an annual &nbsp;battle typically referred to as “sequestration.” Experts say this inevitably leads to political games.</p>
<p>“The whole OCO scam has become a subterfuge that allows people to have their cake and eat it too,” Gordon Adams, a former Office of Management and Budget associate director and current professor at American University, told the Center for Public Integrity. “Everybody has decided that this is better than having a disciplined defense budget,” Adams said.</p>
<p>The Center for Public Integrity <a href="https://www.publicintegrity.org/2014/12/11/16479/long-term-blank-check-war-spending">reported</a> in 2014 that many OCO programs could be delegated to the base defense budget. A 2014 GAO <a href="http://www.gao.gov/assets/670/663939.pdf">report</a> found that U.S. Central Command was funded in part through the war budget, money that should have been transitioned into the base defense budget.</p>
<p>In 2016, Congress added $7.7 billion to OCO as a way to redirect spending and help the base defense budget comply with the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2015. This year the Obama administration requested $5.2 billion in 2017 OCO funds to meet these “unfunded needs in the Pentagon’s base budget” according to defense officials quoted in the Stimson report.</p>
<p>Adams says that’s just a way of getting around budget caps first enacted by the 2011 control act. Those budget caps have already been adjusted upwards by the Bipartisan Budget Acts of 2013 and of 2015.</p>
<p>Some experts contend that the high price tag of the wars could also in part reflect a changing landscape. The conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan have become equipment and technology heavy, according to this argument. Instead of personnel, the U.S. is increasingly making use of more expensive technologies.</p>
<p>Defense Secretary Ash Carter stated at a Senate Appropriations defense subcommittee hearing on May 6, 2015 that the Overseas Contingency Operations funding is unstable. Carter said that the account makes it difficult for the Defense Department to plan ahead.</p>
<p>“Because it doesn’t provide a stable multi-year budget horizon, this one-year approach is managerially unsound and unfairly dispiriting to our force,” Carter said at the hearing. “Our military personnel and their families deserve to know their future more than just one year at a time.”</p>
<p>Last year, a Center for Public Integrity <a href="https://www.publicintegrity.org/2015/03/24/16977/lawmakers-boost-war-spending-wars-wind-down">investigation</a> found that many Senators trying to grow the OCO budget on the Hill received campaign contributions from defense contractors.</p>
<p>The battle over OCO spending has continued during this year’s National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) markups.</p>
<p>House Republicans, led by &nbsp;Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-TX) are currently attempting to direct $18 billion of proposed 2017 OCO war funds on base budget expenses, an action that Carter equated to “gambling with warfighting money at a time of war” at a &nbsp;House Armed Services Committee hearing on April 27. Carter said that proposed redirection of the money would go to efforts that are currently a low priority for the Pentagon and would cut off funding for troops in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria in the middle of the year.</p>
<p>On May 25, Senator John McCain (R-AZ) submitted an amendment to the Senate’s version of the defense bill that would add roughly $17.8 billion to the OCO fund for aircraft, army personnel, readiness, shipbuilding, cooperative Israeli-US defense programs, and other vehicles and equipment. Heeley equates McCain’s proposal to a Christmas list. “There’s an immediacy to McCain and Thornberry’s proposals that isn’t there from the Pentagon. It’s coming from Congress.”</p>
<p>&nbsp;Senate Armed Services committee communications director Dustin Walker countered that McCain’s proposed amendment is designed “to reverse short-sighted [military] cuts…It is a carefully crafted set of resources and capabilities that are required to give our military service members what they need to confront growing threats to our security.”</p>
<p>OCO, however, was not the first choice for funding. Walker wrote that Senator McCain “would be the first to welcome lifting arbitrary defense spending caps and returning to a strategy-based, threat-driven defense budget.”</p>
<p><em>Lauren Chadwick is a Scoville Fellow at the Center for Public Integrity.</em></p>
Soldiers with the 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 1st Cavalry Division perform a security check on their Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicles near the Kuwaiti border as part of the last U.S. military convoy to leave Iraq Sunday, Dec. 18, 2011.
Lauren Chadwickhttps://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/lauren-chadwickAuditors criticize Pentagon for wasting property and ammunitionhttp://www.publicintegrity.org/node/19615The Defense Department is a star in the GAO’s annual report on misspent federal fundsPentagon;Criticize;Wasting2016-05-03T08:00:01-04:002016-05-03T08:00:00-04:00<p>At eleven o’clock most mornings in the city of McAlester, Oklahoma, residents feel the ground shake as bombs go off at an army ammunition depot nearby. Smoke sometimes billows from the depot’s 52 detonation pits as the army destroys unused ammunition daily, part of a regular practice that in 2015 cost the Pentagon roughly $118 million.</p>
<p>The problem is: Some of the ammunition may be usable by other federal agencies, according to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), which has criticized the Pentagon for not trying hard enough to assess who else wanted it.</p>
<p>The wanton ammo destruction is one of seven instances of alleged Defense Department mismanagement cited in the GAO’s annual <a href="http://www.gao.gov/assets/680/676473.pdf">summary</a> of wasteful and duplicate programs across the federal government, released on April 13, 2016. Examples at the Pentagon include overpaying for satellite communications, giving away property that could be used by other agencies, and mishandling vital pollution information.</p>
<p>Although some reforms have been undertaken in response to the GAO’s suggestions, “there are tens of billions of dollars in additional savings to be had,” Comptroller General Gene Dodaro told the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform at a <a href="https://oversight.house.gov/hearing/waste-and-inefficiency-in-the-federal-government-gaos-2016-duplication-report/">hearing</a> on April 13.&nbsp;&nbsp;</p>
<p>For example, if the Pentagon gave some of its usable bullets and explosives to other federal agencies, the 298-page GAO <a href="http://www.gao.gov/assets/680/676473.pdf">report</a> said, it would save the cost of blowing it up and help other agencies meet their needs on the cheap. While the Defense Department has successfully transferred some of this ammunition to other agencies, Pentagon officials told the GAO that at least 3,533 tons of serviceable ammo sits in the army’s stockpile of excess ammunition at plants like the one in McAlester, waiting for disposal.&nbsp;</p>
<p>The federal government could save millions of dollars if the Defense Department transferred its extra property and ammunition to other agencies so “we, ya know, don’t have to buy it twice,” Dodaro told the committee.</p>
<p>Ammo is not the only Pentagon commodity that winds up getting wasted or misused, Dodaro noted. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has repeatedly purchased new excavation equipment it could have gotten from the Pentagon, according to a January 2016 GAO <a href="http://www.gao.gov/assets/680/674872.pdf">report</a> summarized in Dodaro’s presentation. DHS was one of nine federal agencies that collectively spent $28 million on such machines in 2013 and 2014, even though the Defense Department had them on hand and didn’t need them, the report said. The Pentagon instead sent $25 million worth of excavation machines to 150 different local law enforcement groups across the country, because the Defense Department favored local entities that promised to work on counterdrug and counterterrorism missions.</p>
<p>The GAO also said the military has wasted funds by failing to coordinate its purchases of commercial satellite time, needed for controlling drone aircraft, urgent military or humanitarian relief operations, and new weapons or intelligence systems. The Defense Department spent more than $1 billion to lease commercial satellite time in 2011, but its needs have increased since then. All purchases were supposed to go through a central Pentagon agency set up to save money through bulk purchasing, but the military services frequently flouted the requirement and used their own funds – provided under “supplemental” portions of the annual defense spending bills – to buy the time on their own, at costs that were 16 percent higher, on average, the GAO said.</p>
<p>The Defense Department has had difficulty getting its arms around the problem, the GAO said, and lacks a good tally of all the commercial satellite time its components are buying now. But the Pentagon has roughly estimated that better leasing could save well over a billion dollars during the next 15 years in its Middle East operations alone.</p>
<p>The GAO also asserted that the Pentagon mismanages environmental data collected to help protect soldiers when they are deployed overseas. Since the late 1990s, the Pentagon has gathered air, soil, and water samples, but stored the resulting information haphazardly in two incompatible databases. This means the Pentagon can’t effectively determine if pollution on or near military army bases is causing ill health, a gap that makes it hard for soldiers to get needed compensation, the GAO said.</p>
<p>Moreover, the Pentagon doesn’t know if all the data is correct because the military services don’t have rigorous sampling standards, the GAO said.</p>
<p>The Army Public Health Command, which manages one of the databases, told the GAO it would be too time-consuming and costly to move all the data to a single database. At the April 13 hearing, Defense Department Assistant Deputy Chief Management Officer David Tillotson said he was unsure why it was taking so long to fix the problem. “I can tell you we are working on it, and we are looking to resolve the issue,” Mr. Tillotson said.</p>
<p>The report notes that over the past six years, the GAO has made 152 major proposals for policy changes and improvements at the Pentagon to avoid waste from duplication. The Defense Department so far has implemented only 37.5 percent of these, the GAO said.</p>
<p>But Congress is not exactly setting a good example, having only implemented 32 percent of GAO suggestions, according to the GAO report. Representative Elijah Cummings (MD), the committee’s senior Democrat, noted at the April 13 <a href="https://oversight.house.gov/hearing/waste-and-inefficiency-in-the-federal-government-gaos-2016-duplication-report/">hearing</a> that Congress itself “could be doing much more to foster a more efficient, effective and accountable government.”</p>
Defense Secretary Ash Carter listens to a reporter's question during a news conference at the Pentagon, Thursday, Jan. 28, 2016, where he announced the latest in his Force of the Future reforms.
Lauren Chadwickhttps://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/lauren-chadwickDebunked: Terrorist attacks often occur in clustershttp://www.publicintegrity.org/node/19545Terror attacks are not more likely on holidays or shortly after other attacks, experts sayPseudoscience;Debunker;Skeptics2016-04-19T19:07:00-04:002016-04-12T08:00:00-04:00<p>Within hours of the March 22 terrorist attacks in Brussels, New York city authorities deployed roughly 400 National Guard troops at major transit hubs in New York City, and transit police in Washington D.C. also ordered a surge at subway stops.&nbsp; The Washington police tweeted reassuringly that they were “closely monitoring events in Brussels w/our fed partners."</p>
<p>Visibly surging security personnel in urban centers after a major terrorist incident has become a habitual response around the globe since the 9/11 attacks in New York and Washington, putting citizens on edge and occasionally causing policing expenses to spike.&nbsp; But it turns out there’s little evidence that such an aggressive public response is necessary, according to a new report by terrorism experts at the RAND Corporation.</p>
<p>The experts studied 140,000 terror attacks in the United States and Europe between 1970 and 2013, and found no statistically significant evidence after 2003 that one big attack will spawn another one immediately afterward, producing a “cluster” of related incidents.</p>
<p>&nbsp;“Visible increases in security reflect prudence, but also suggest that there is reason to worry about further terrorist attacks,” experts Brian Jenkins, Henry Willis and Bing Han wrote in their <a href="http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/perspectives/PE100/PE173/RAND_PE173.pdf">report</a>, published on March 31. But since 2003, they said, terrorist attacks in Western countries have actually not been occurring in clusters, which they define as falling within a 30-day period.</p>
<p>The incidents studied were listed in a global database of terrorism events that produced at least one fatality. The database was compiled from open sources by the University of Maryland.</p>
<p>Before 2003, some terrorist attacks did occur in clusters, suggesting that officials in Europe and the United States might now be reacting reflexively to a pattern that is no longer prevalent.&nbsp; The Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA), for example, carried out clusters of attacks in Ireland and the United Kingdom in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, and Basque separatists in Spain, ETA, carried out clusters of attacks starting in the 1970s. But the clustering phenomenon started to drop off by 1993, and now there is no statistical evidence that a large terrorist attack will trigger or inspire another attack.</p>
<p>&nbsp;“Jihadists have not been able to field groups in the United States or Europe that are capable of sustaining terrorist campaigns like those that operated in Europe from the 1970s to the early 1990s or in the United States primarily during the 1970s,” the authors explain.</p>
<p>The report also disputes another commonly-held view about the timing of terrorist attacks. Terrorists generally have not attacked on symbolically important dates in the U.S. and Europe. While attacks increased slightly on dates around Independence Day and New Years’ Eve, the evidence did not show any increased likelihood of attacks on anniversaries such as September 11 or other symbolic dates such as Ramadan or Christmas.</p>
<p>Some experts who study terrorism say they doubt that terrorists keep a calendar. Attacks are timed when those involved conclude they will be successful. The RAND authors state that Independence Day and New Years’ Eve, for instance, draw large crowds that represent a vulnerable target.</p>
<p>A third, surprising argument in the report is that terrorism in the West has been declining. The incidence of attacks decreased roughly 94 percent between 1976 and 2013, the RAND tally showed, again reflecting the different capabilities of European paramilitary groups and present day jihadists.</p>
<p>At the same time, the deadliness of recent attacks has increased. The scale of the 9/11 attacks was “unprecedented.” &nbsp;And since then, the proportion of incidents with more than three fatalities has increased.</p>
<p>Some experts said they didn’t take much comfort from the new report. With respect to “some of the European [jihadist] plotters who were captured, we now know that they had been planning a series of attacks. It calls into question how reliable this finding is,” said Jessica Stern, a research professor at Boston University’s Pardee School of Global Studies who has interviewed terrorists and written several books on their motivations.</p>
<p>The RAND authors acknowledged that they could not rule out that police surges had deterred some coordinated or copycat attacks. And they also warned that the future might not be like the past: “It’s important to monitor” whether terrorism related to the Islamic State will be different, said Henry Willis, director of the RAND Corporation’s Homeland Security and Defense Center and one of the study authors, in an interview.</p>
<p>Stern said that there’s some evidence of a shift already. “Most of the attacks we’ve seen until now carried out in ISIS’s name are not the kind of attack we would expect to be clustering --they’re individuals who radicalize themselves or small groups that seem to have minimal if any contact with ISIS… [But] the kind of attacks we’ve seen in Paris and Belgium are not that kind. They involved highly trained operatives and they’re part of a plot that’s a broader attack.”</p>
<p>Belgian authorities have reported in recent days that those involved in the Paris attacks were planning additional bombings there – months later -- but undertook the March 22 attacks in Brussels instead because they feared that police were closing in.</p>
<p><em>Lauren Chadwick is a Scoville Fellow at the Center for Public Integrity. </em></p>
<p><strong><em>This article was co-published with Slate.</em></strong></p>
Police investigate an area where terror suspect Mohamed Abrini was arrested earlier today, in Brussels on Friday April 8, 2016. The federal prosecutor's office confirmed a fugitive suspect in the Nov. 13 Paris attacks was arrested in Belgium on Friday, after a raid Belgian authorities said was linked to the deadly March 22 Brussels bombings. The suspect, Mohamed Abrini, is believed to be the mysterious "man in the hat" who escaped the double bombing at Brussels airport, but further investigation is needed to determine Abrini is the third suspect of the airport attack.
Lauren Chadwickhttps://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/lauren-chadwickGlobal military spending is increasinghttp://www.publicintegrity.org/node/19532Non-western countries in particular boost defense budgetsDefense;Military2016-04-06T09:24:07-04:002016-04-06T09:24:07-04:00<p>Last year, the world’s military spending increased for the first time in four years, a directional shift that may herald even higher spending on armaments and operations in years to come, according to new data compiled by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).</p>
<p>The world heaped more than $1.6 trillion on military programs and personnel in 2015, roughly 1 percent more than in 2014, a SIPRI analyst declared at the nonpartisan Stimson Center in Washington, D.C. on April 5. The increase follows four years of decline, which was preceded by 12 years of steady increases.</p>
<p>So the brief falloff is over, and the familiar routine is back.</p>
<p>“The dynamic for state spending has changed everywhere,” Aude Fleurant, Director of the Arms and Military Expenditure Programme at SIPRI said during a panel discussion. Many non-western countries in particular increased their military spending in 2015, she said.</p>
<p>“There’s a possibility that this is a transitional year.” Fleurant added. If spending continues to rise, it would make the decreases between 2011 and 2014 insignificant, she said. Fleurant noted, however, that the evidence was not clearcut, because some countries boosted spending due to conflicts while others cut spending due to economic pressures.</p>
<p>&nbsp;It’s “a very interesting moment,” Gordon Adams, a former White House budget official and emeritus professor at American University said at the Stimson event.&nbsp; “The era of the drawdown is over.”</p>
<p>In 2015, the United States was still the world’s largest military spender — its $596 billion accounting for 36 percent of the world’s military spending, according to SIPRI’s data. China was in a distant second place, increasing its defense spending by 7.4 percent to reach an estimated $215 billion. Saudi Arabia surpassed Russia to become the third largest defense spender, spending $87.2 billion in 2015. Russian military spending was estimated at $66.4 billion.</p>
<p>Current U.S. spending is well below the $711.3 billion spent in 2011, and 2.4 percent lower than in 2014, SIPRI said. &nbsp;Overall U.S. and Western European military spending remains lower than it was in 2006. But the Obama administration has proposed to boost U.S. military spending by roughly 0.4 percent in 2017, making the decline “probably the most shallow…. that we’ve seen since the end of the Second World War,” Adams said.</p>
<p>SIPRI’s tallies include spending on the armed forces, defense ministries, paramilitary forces, military research, space activities and peacekeeping forces.</p>
<p>Overall spending in Asia, East Europe, and Oceania went up. Conflict in Ukraine pushed spending by Central European countries up by 13 percent. A drop in global oil prices moderated an expected military spending increase in Russia, SIPRI said, and forced South American military spending to drop by 4 percent in 2015. Countries such as Venezuela, Ecuador and Brazil in particular had much less to spend.</p>
<p>SIPRI was unable to provide a regional estimate for the Middle East, noting large uncertainties about military spending in Kuwait, Qatar, Syria, the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen. For nations such as China, SIPRI could only provide an estimate, since China does not publicize all its spending and SIPRI draws its conclusions from official statements and open source spending data. Several Central Asian republics do not publish figures, and Saudi Arabia only announces what they plan to spend, not what they actually spent.</p>
<p><em>Lauren Chadwick is a Herbert Scoville Jr. Fellow at the Center for Public Integrity.</em></p>
In this Aug. 10, 2014, file photo, an aircraft lands after missions targeting the Islamic State group in Iraq from the deck of the U.S. Navy aircraft carrier USS George H.W. Bush in the Persian Gulf.
Lauren Chadwickhttps://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/lauren-chadwickBio-threat protections inadequate http://www.publicintegrity.org/node/19479Reports say government response still inadequate, even after Ebola, Zika outbreaksUnited States Environmental Protection Agency;Government Accountability Office;United States Department of Health and Human Services;Homeland security;United States Department of Homeland Security;War on Terror;Biological warfare;Biodefense;BioWatch;West African Ebola virus epidemic;Zika virus outbreak;Ebola virus disease2016-03-30T12:14:14-04:002016-03-23T05:00:00-04:00<p>Despite the Obama administration’s repeated warnings about the menace of a widespread contagion within the United States, both lawmakers and independent experts&nbsp;have recently given&nbsp;low marks to government initiatives designed to detect, track, and protect against those threats.</p>
<p>In recent years, both the Ebola outbreak in West Africa and the spread of the Zika virus in Latin America have brought the nature of threat into sharp relief. In the 2015 Worldwide Threat <a href="http://www.dni.gov/files/documents/Unclassified_2015_ATA_SFR_-_SASC_FINAL.pdf">Assessment</a>, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper admitted that the world’s response to Ebola was too slow.</p>
<p>“Gaps in disease surveillance and reporting, limited health care resources, and other factors contributed to the outpacing of the international community’s response in West Africa,” Clapper wrote. In the most recent Worldwide Threat <a href="http://www.armed-services.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Clapper_02-09-16.pdf">Assessment</a>, released in February, &nbsp;Clapper issued an ominous warning in regard to the Zika virus, which he said “is projected to cause up to 4 million cases in 2016; it will probably spread to virtually every country in the hemisphere.”</p>
<p>Earlier this month, that assessment was amplified by researchers from the National Center for Atmospheric Research and the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research. &nbsp;In a study published in the Public Library of Science’s journal <a href="http://currents.plos.org/outbreaks/article/on-the-seasonal-occurrence-and-abundance-of-the-zika-virus-vector-mosquito-aedes-aegypti-in-the-contiguous-united-states/"><em>PLOS Currents: Outbreaks</em></a>, they warned that at least 50 U.S. cities are at risk for a Zika Virus outbreak this summer.</p>
<p>&nbsp;As the effects of climate change spread worldwide, experts warn more that contagions are on their way. And yet, the two Department of Homeland Security (DHS) programs meant to protect Americans against these biological threats aren’t up to the task, according to the Government Accountability Office (GAO).</p>
<p>One of these programs, the National Biosurveillance Integration Center, or NBIC, was created in 2007 to be a hub of information and coordination for federal agencies tracking diseases and biological threats. But the mission is suffering, a September 2015 GAO <a href="http://www.gao.gov/assets/680/672732.pdf">report</a> said, because many federal agencies, such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), are not sharing &nbsp;&nbsp;information with NBIC. &nbsp;Among the reasons, CDC officials said: legal restrictions that compel them to redact data from reports, a labor-intensive process. &nbsp;The report said other federal agencies’ officials did not understand the purpose or value of giving resources to NBIC.</p>
<p>“[NBIC doesn’t] have the access to information and data, they don’t have the trust of partners,” said Chris Currie, director of the GAO’s Emergency Management and National Preparedness Team, in an interview. &nbsp;“What they do provide is good but it isn’t really that useful for the partners.”</p>
<p>DHS did not respond to a request for comment. But in its response to the GAO report, the agency noted that GAO had not surveyed state and local authorities. “DHS believes that NBIC’s products provide these stakeholders significant value,” the agency wrote, adding that NBIC is developing tools to facilitate better information gathering.</p>
<p>Nevertheless, Andrew C. Weber, former assistant defense secretary for nuclear, chemical and biological defense programs, is among those who find the status quo unacceptable.</p>
<p>“I think it’s outrageous that any agency wouldn’t feel obligated to share with other agencies just as a matter of course,” he said. &nbsp;“I’ve heard all of the excuses for not sharing and I think they don’t hold up in a world where early detection of biological events can save lives.” Weber continued: “Data collection, data sharing, data management were a major impediment during the entire Ebola crisis.”</p>
<p>NBIC’s reports during the Ebola crisis did provide biosurveillance information, but those working in government during the crisis recall that it was just another resource, rather than a substantive information clearinghouse. Some experts don’t remember NBIC’s role during the crisis at all.</p>
<p>In the&nbsp;aftermath of the crisis, the Obama administration's former Ebola Czar Ronald Klain has <a href="http://democracyjournal.org/magazine/40/confronting-the-pandemic-threat/">suggested</a> the creation&nbsp;of a Public Health Emergency Management Agency—a specialized group of people trained to deal with emerging disease outbreaks. Critics counter that another center is unnecessary; and that&nbsp;instead federal agencies need to work together.</p>
<p>NBIC isn’t the only DHS program facing criticism; officials are also skeptical of BioWatch, a system of about 600 air collectors in 30 cities nationwide that is meant to detect a mass biological event such as a terrorist attack.</p>
<p>The collectors resemble little ice boxes and are meant to “sniff” the air for an intruder such as Anthrax or smallpox. But the air samples are only retrieved once every 24 hours. A local public health official has to manually remove a filter from the ice box and take it to a lab to determine if it matches a known toxin. The entire process is estimated to take between 12 and 36 hours, which experts say is too slow.</p>
<p>Attempts to automate that process failed.</p>
<p>Between 2009 and 2014, DHS spent at least $61 million in an effort to create a more high-tech box that could both collect the sample and analyze it within 4 to 6 hours. That initiative, dubbed “Gen 3,” turned out to be science fiction. DHS cancelled the project in 2014 in the wake of a September 2012 GAO<a href="http://www.gao.gov/assets/650/648026.pdf"> report</a> that found it was billions of dollars over budget.</p>
<p>The GAO subsequently said in October2015 that it wasn’t clear the current BioWatch technology was working either, because DHS had never properly tested the existing air collectors.</p>
<p>“They didn’t really document all of the uncertainties with the system, which you kind of need to know,” Currie said.</p>
<p>DHS largely concurred with that GAO report, but took exception to GAO’s conclusion that DHS had not established proper performance requirements for the system during testing.</p>
<p>Despite the controversy over BioWatch’s effectiveness, the Obama administration is proposing to spend $81.9 million on the program in its fiscal year 2017 <a href="https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/FY2017BIB.pdf">budget</a>.</p>
<p>Other experts say the whole Biowatch concept is flawed. &nbsp;Dr. Laura Kahn at Princeton University’s Program on Science and Global Security, an expert on biodefense and pandemics, suggested that money would be better spent tracking animal life, <a href="http://thebulletin.org/animals-worlds-best-and-cheapest-biosensors">arguing</a> that animals can be monitored as natural biosensors. Other experts agree that collection methods need to evolve to include more animal specimens.</p>
<p>But former DOD official Weber believes that a variety of detection methods must be employed, and then coordinated across the government. At the moment, bio-surveillance programs are spread across numerous federal agencies.</p>
<p>“If there were to be a large aerosol release of say anthrax, the earliest detection would be environmental sensors,” he said. “That’s because animals wouldn’t get sick immediately.” Air sampling, Weber said, is vital to the strategy. “We can’t afford to lose a few days.”</p>
<p>&nbsp;“That’s why I really believe in integrated comprehensive surveillance that includes both environmental and clinical data,” Weber added. “It can’t be stove-piped; we can’t rely on just one aspect,” says Weber.</p>
<p>Congress has put forth a potential legislative fix. The CBRNE Defense <a href="https://homeland.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/102915-HR__CBRNE.pdf">Act</a> of 2015 would create a new office within DHS, the Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear, and Explosives Office, which would place both NBIC and BioWatch under integrated new management.</p>
<p>President Obama’s 2017 budget accounts for this bureaucratic shift even though this legislation has not yet passed in the Senate: the House approved the idea on Dec. 10, 2015.</p>
<p>Members of Congress expressed frustration at the current state of affairs in a February 11 hearing of the House Homeland Security Committee’s subcommittee on Emergency Preparedness, Response &amp; Communications. &nbsp;</p>
<p>“I've grown frustrated, like many, that we seem to be having the same hearings over and over again. At least once every Congress, we ask the department to come to the committee to respond to the latest criticisms of BioWatch and NBIC,” Congressman Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) said in his opening statement.</p>
<p>And even coordinating NBIC and BioWatch within DHS may not be the answer. The GAO asserted in its testimony at the subcommittee hearing that the White House’s implementation plan and strategy for bio-surveillance falls short, because they do not establish where bio-surveillance fits into the larger biodefense strategy. &nbsp;A separate Blue Ribbon Study Panel&nbsp;<a href="http://www.biodefensestudy.org/SiteAssets/report-a-national-blueprint-for-biodefense/A%20National%20Blueprint%20for%20Biodefense.pdf">concluded</a>&nbsp;in 2015 that the government’s biodefenses needed to be better organized. The panel suggested that the effort be placed under the Office of the Vice President.</p>
<p><em>Lauren Chadwick is a Scoville fellow at CPI.</em></p>
In this Oct. 16, 2014, file photo, Registered nurse Keene Roadman, stands fully dressed in personal protective equipment during a training class at the Rush University Medical Center, in Chicago.
Lauren Chadwickhttps://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/lauren-chadwickYou could buy an Australian island for what the Pentagon says it would cost to take inventory — of one itemhttp://www.publicintegrity.org/node/19428In response to a FOIA request, the Pentagon admits that its master list of contracts is not searchable The Pentagon;Marketing;Lean manufacturing;Manufacturing;Operations research;Supply chain management;Inventory;Inventory turnover2016-03-18T12:41:49-04:002016-03-17T05:00:00-04:00<p>The Pentagon dashed any hopes that it might soon be able to pass a simple audit, when it provided a surprisingly unhelpful&nbsp;response late last month to a simple question about how many widgets of a particular kind that it had in stock.</p>
<p>Understanding the worrying significance of the Pentagon’s statement that it essentially&nbsp;had no idea what the number is requires a bit of detail.</p>
<p>The widget that was being asked about has a narrow purpose: It’s basically a portable power station that looks like a small, plastic toolbox. Dubbed <a href="https://www.cru-inc.com/products/wiebetech/hotplug_field_kit/">the HotPlug</a>, it was crafted to allow government investigators to transfer suspects’ computers to their laboratories for forensic analysis, without first shutting the computers down. And so an Oregon-based software developer, Martin Peck, who worries about privacy issues and government secrecy, in July 2015 sent the Defense Department a Freedom of Information Act request, asking how many such devices it had in its possession.</p>
<p>Answering this simple question, the Pentagon said, would take the department — hold your breath now — 15 million labor hours. Doing so would cost — no, don’t breathe yet — $660 million, the Pentagon said.</p>
<p>While this sum is essentially chump change at the Pentagon — a bit more than one-tenth of one percent of its annual budget — in the world outside the five-sided building it’s enough to buy the Washington Nationals baseball team, a 600-acre island off the coast of Australia, twelve of the most expensive Ferrari racecars, or about as much as the Pentagon is currently spending to train Iraqi soldiers in combat.</p>
<p>Critics, including those who study modern business practices, say the reply spoke volumes about how poorly the Pentagon keeps track of its own purchasing and contracting. That issue lies at the core of persistent criticisms that the department cannot meet modern accounting standards, a circumstance that critics say opens the door widely for waste, fraud, and abuse in military expenditures.</p>
<p>Why does the Pentagon have so much trouble determining how many specific widgets it has in its possession?</p>
<p>In a two-page response to Peck, the department's FOIA office said Robert Jarrett, the Pentagon’s Director of Operations, Defense Procurement and Acquisition Policy, had explained that although the Pentagon maintains a database of all its contracts — in something called the Electronic Documents Access (EDA) system — it cannot be comprehensively searched.</p>
<p>The Electronic Documents Access system was switched on eighteen years ago after being constructed at a cost of millions of dollars, and it now includes an estimated 30 million contracts. But&nbsp;the FOIA officer, signing&nbsp;the letter to&nbsp;Peck&nbsp;on behalf of&nbsp;FOIA chief Stephanie L. Carr, <a href="http://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/2719425/15-F-1498-Final-Response.pdf">wrote in the response</a>: “No method exists for a complete text search of EDA, as some documents are scans of paper copies.” The estimate that someone would need 15 million hours, or about 1,712 years, to come up with an answer -- including any redactions required to keep company secrets out of the public domain -- &nbsp;was based on&nbsp;the department's&nbsp;presumption that the person doing the searching would have to read all of the contracts, and spend 20 minutes on each one.</p>
<p>&nbsp;“It makes me want to cry as a taxpayer and a citizen that DOD still doesn’t have working accounting systems,” says Rafael DeGennaro, a former congressional staff member who now directs the nonprofit Audit the Pentagon&nbsp;<a href="http://auditthepentagon.org/">initiative</a>, which presses for legislation to force better accounting of how the military spends its $580 billion annual budget. “They need this information to manage the place and they need this information to justify the burden of taxes we pay into the black box that is Pentagon accounting.”</p>
<p>It’s not the first time that the Pentagon’s inability to say what it’s got in its possession has been under a spotlight. It’s clear — even to top Pentagon officials — that one consequence is that a lot of money gets wasted buying things the Pentagon does not actually need to buy.</p>
<p>Because the Pentagon did not know how&nbsp;many spare parts it already had for a military transport airplane, called the C-130, it spent $6.6 million between July 2012 and June 2014 on parts that it did not need, according to a June 2015 Department of Defense Inspector General’s&nbsp;<a href="http://www.dodig.mil/pubs/documents/DODIG-2015-132.pdf">report</a>. Similarly, partly because the Pentagon didn’t know how many useful spare parts it had on hand for its V-22 Osprey military helicopter, it spent $8.7 million between August 2014 and May 2015 on parts it did not need, according to a separate Inspector General&nbsp;<a href="http://www.dodig.mil/pubs/documents/DODIG-2015-136.pdf">report</a>. It predicted that storing those extra parts would cost $700,000 over the next five years.</p>
<p>Paul Bracken, a professor of management at Yale University, said in an interview that nearly all successful organizations have searchable parts databases. “All businesses keep meticulous control of inventory, what the product is, what it costs, how long it’s been on the shelf,” he said. “A private corporation would have that information literally at their fingertips because they have relational databases to store it all. A relational database means you can search by any criteria you want.”</p>
<p>A 1990&nbsp;<a href="http://www.dol.gov/ocfo/media/regs/cfoa.pdf">law</a>&nbsp;requires federal agencies to pass an annual audit, which requires among other things that they be able to account for all their possessions. But the Pentagon has never complied — it is the sole outlier, responsible for roughly half of all federal discretionary spending — and its deadline for passing such an audit keeps extending.</p>
<p>When Peck made a similar FOIA&nbsp;<a href="https://www.muckrock.com/foi/united-states-of-america-10/kingfishing-18596/#comm-161086">request</a>&nbsp;to the Drug Enforcement Agency, for example, asking how many Harris Kingfish systems it had bought to track phone calls, the DEA replied within a month that it had two. A press spokesperson for the DEA, Barbara Carreno, said in an emailed statement that the agency uses a Department of Justice database called the Unified Financial Management System to track “contracts and accountable property.” The database has a search function.</p>
<p>Presidential candidates Ted Cruz and Bernie Sanders don’t agree on much, but bringing the Pentagon’s self-awareness up to modern accounting standards is one topic they both feel is urgent.</p>
<p>&nbsp;A&nbsp;<a href="https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/senate-bill/327/">bill</a>&nbsp;they have co-sponsored with six other Senators would impose a series of graduated punishments if the Pentagon fails to pass an audit soon. These punishments include changing financial management positions if the Department fails to pass an audit for fiscal year 2016, and blocking the Defense Department from upgrading or acquiring certain new weapons if it fails to obtain an audit for fiscal year 2017. The bill has been referred to a committee, but no hearing about it has been scheduled.</p>
<p><strong>Lauren Chadwick is a Scoville fellow at the Center for Public Integrity.</strong></p>
<p><strong><em>This story was co-published with <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2016/03/the_simple_question_the_pentagon_can_t_answer_unless_you_have_660_million.html">Slate</a>.</em></strong></p>
Defense Secretary Ash Carter walks away from a podium after making an announcement about his Force of the Future reforms, Thursday, Jan. 28, 2016, during a news conference at the Pentagon.
Lauren Chadwickhttps://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/lauren-chadwickMost voters favor cutting defense spending. Politicians say otherwise http://www.publicintegrity.org/node/19416In a comprehensive new survey, most voters favored a decrease of at least $12 billion in the Pentagon’s spending.Presidency of Barack Obama;Deficit reduction in the United States;Public choice theory;California Proposition 272016-03-10T18:17:37-05:002016-03-10T11:00:00-05:00<p><em><strong>March 10, 2016:</strong>&nbsp;This story has been&nbsp;<a href="https://www.publicintegrity.org/2016/03/10/19416/most-voters-favor-cutting-defense-spending-politicians-say-otherwise#correction">corrected</a></em><span style="color:rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family:ff-tisa-web-pro,helvetica neue,helvetica,arial,sans-serif; font-size:18px">.</span></p>
<p>Both the Obama administration and Congress are pushing for higher spending on the military next year, as are most of the presidential candidates. But most American voters have a different opinion, preferring military spending cuts instead.</p>
<p>The nonpartisan organization Voice Of the People recently gave registered voters around the country the task of forming their own defense budgets, after hearing vetted pro and con arguments, and it found that more than half favored cutting defense spending at least $12 billion.</p>
<p>President Barack Obama, in contrast, has proposed to add $2.4 billion in 2017 to the current defense budget, reflecting core spending of $523.9 billion plus another $58.8 billion ostensibly meant for&nbsp;overseas contingency operations.</p>
<p>The major presidential candidates’ positions on defense spending are not all clear-cut, but analysts credit the top four Republican presidential candidates as supporting increased defense spending, while <a href="https://www.publicintegrity.org/2015/04/12/17107/12-things-know-about-hillary-clinton">Hillary Clinton</a> hasn’t staked out a clear position, and <a href="https://www.publicintegrity.org/2015/04/30/17261/12-things-know-about-bernie-sanders">Bernie Sanders</a> has said he would cut it substantially.</p>
<p>The survey, <a href="http://time.com/4253842/defense-spending-obama-congress-poll-voters/?xid=homepage">released in Washington </a>on March 9 by VOIP, which is affiliated with the University of Maryland, is not the first such comprehensive study to show majority voter preference for a defense spending cut.</p>
<p>A similar 2012 survey by three nonprofit groups, including the University of Maryland group and the <a href="http://www.publicintegrity.org">Center for Public Integrity</a>, found most of the public then backed deep spending cuts in most categories of military spending, including air power, sea power, ground forces, nuclear weapons&nbsp;and missile defense.</p>
<p>In the new 2016 survey, most voters proposed bringing the core budget down to the same level they preferred in 2012, around $497 billion. Since core defense spending has indeed declined over the past four years, this represents a smaller proportional cut than majorities favored in the earlier poll.</p>
<p>A majority of voters surveyed between December 2015 and February 2016 nonetheless said they wanted defense cuts in almost every area of the military, including cutting ground forces by $4 million, nuclear weapons by $3 billion, air power by $2 billion, naval forces by $2 billion&nbsp;and missile defense by $1 billion. Respondents wanted to keep the budgets for special operations forces and the Marines at the same level but sought no increase in any specific military area.</p>
<p>Voter opposition to increased military spending was once again mostly bipartisan. In <a href="http://www.publicintegrity.org/2012/05/10/8856/public-overwhelmingly-supports-large-defense-spending-cuts">the 2012 survey</a>, two-thirds of Republicans and nine in 10 Democrats supported making immediate cuts. This time, a majority of Democrats wanted to cut the budget by $36 billion, and a majority of independents favored a $20 billion cut, while 50 percent of Republicans favored decreasing spending or keeping it the same, and 48 percent favored increasing it.</p>
<p>“Given all the talk about increasing the defense budget, we were surprised to find how much Americans are not sold on increases, including a majority of Republicans nationwide,” Steven Kull, director of the University of Maryland’s Program for Public Consultation (PPC) and president of Voice Of the People, said in a prepared statement.</p>
<p>The sample consisted of 7,126 registered voters across the country, giving it an unusually small margin of error: 1.4 percent. The survey was administered through an online program developed by the Program for Public Consultation at the University of Maryland. Respondents were given arguments for and against defense spending, as they were in 2012, to more comprehensively assess their preferences and to simulate policymaking. Staff members of the House and Senate appropriations subcommittees on defense vetted the arguments for accuracy.</p>
<p>In both surveys, respondents repeatedly labeled the arguments for and against spending as convincing. Majorities, however, found the arguments in favor of defense spending cuts more convincing.</p>
<p>The most convincing argument in favor of trimming the budget, for example, asserted that Congress often approves “unnecessary spending” and that the military branches do a poor job of “tracking where money goes.”</p>
<p>The survey also assessed how much most voters think the federal government is presently spending on the military. Respondents were given information about the size of the national defense budget in five different contexts, and as in 2012, their responses were influenced by these contexts.</p>
<p>When voters looked at the defense budget as a proportion of the U.S. annual discretionary budget, for instance, a majority found defense spending to be more than they expected. Similarly, when voters were presented the defense budget in comparison with potential enemies and allies’ budgets or in conjunction with a list of previous U.S. defense spending levels, substantially more respondents found the budget to exceed what they expected. Only when presented as a percentage of the U.S. GDP on a graph showing a decrease over time from 1960-2015, did a majority find the defense budget was less than expected.</p>
<p>When given the opportunity to evaluate specific weapons systems, majorities this time favored downsizing two notoriously costly weapon systems, the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter and nuclear-powered aircraft carriers. In fact, a majority endorsed cancelling the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter Program altogether, something that would save $6 billion quickly and nearly $100 billion through 2037.</p>
<p>But not all programs were given the boot. Majorities endorsed building the Air Force’s Next Generation Bomber, recently named the B21, for example.&nbsp;A majority of respondents also supported building the Navy’s new nuclear strike submarines,&nbsp;and opposed reducing the number of planned new submarines from 12 to 8.</p>
<p>On the topic of Afghanistan, most voters favored a continued presence of 5,500 troops —&nbsp;the current plan for U.S. presence in the country, a rare instance where the administration’s military spending proposals were in synch with voter preferences.</p>
<p>Defense spending is still above $500 billion, and the budget appears likely to rise. But the overall message from voters is clear —&nbsp;cut defense spending. It’s just not being heeded.</p>
<p><em><strong>Lauren Chadwick is a Scoville fellow at the Center for Public Integrity.</strong></em></p>
<p><strong><em>This story was co-published with <a href="http://time.com/4253842/defense-spending-obama-congress-poll-voters/?xid=homepage">TIME</a>.</em></strong></p>
<p><strong><em><a id="correction" name="correction"></a>March</em></strong><em><strong>&nbsp;10, 2016:&nbsp;</strong></em><strong><em> </em></strong><em>An earlier version stated that 61 percent of those surveyed supported cutting $12 billion from the defense budget.&nbsp;Actually, 61 percent&nbsp;of&nbsp;those surveyed supported&nbsp;cutting&nbsp;the defense budget, while fifty-two percent supported cutting it $12 billion or more.</em></p>
Defense Secretary Ash Carter, right, sitting next to Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Joseph Dunford, Jr., left, testifies before the House Appropriations subcommittee on the president's 2017 budget during a hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, Thursday, Feb. 25, 2016.
Lauren Chadwickhttps://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/lauren-chadwick